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Discriminating Ears: Critical Receptions of Blackness in the Music of George Gershwin and William Grant Still Hannah Edgar University of Chicago

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Discriminating Ears: Critical Receptions of Blackness in the Music of George Gershwin and William Grant Still Hannah Edgar University of Chicago Nota Bene: Canadian Undergraduate Journal of Musicology Volume 11 | Issue 1 Article 5 Discriminating Ears: Critical Receptions of Blackness in the Music of George Gershwin and William Grant Still Hannah Edgar University of Chicago Recommended Citation Edgar, Hannah () "Discriminating Ears: Critical Receptions of Blackness in the Music of George Gershwin and William Grant Still," Nota Bene: Canadian Undergraduate Journal of Musicology: Vol. 11: Iss. 1, Article 5. Discriminating Ears: Critical Receptions of Blackness in the Music of George Gershwin and William Grant Still Abstract At the apex of their careers, composers George Gershwin and William Grant Still produced what they believed were their finest works: respectively, Porgy and Bess (1935), an opera by a white American composer about African American subjects, and Troubled Island (1949), an opera by an African American composer about Haitian subjects. However, both works fared poorly upon their premiere, with critics decrying Porgy and Bess and Troubled Island as “unoperatic.” Besides providing historical context to both operas, this paper argues that the critical rhetoric surrounding them was tinged by racialized notions of what musical “blackness” sounded like, or should sound like, to white ears. This paper focuses on critics’ coinage of “the cheap” or “popular” as a euphemism for music inspired by African American musical traditions like jazz, the blues, and spirituals. The paper concludes that, while the art music canon can be responsive to social justice movements, critics’ scorn of works like Porgy and Bess and Troubled Island contributes to the entrenchment of an implicitly racialized high–low musical dichotomy. Keywords William Grant Still, George Gershwin, music criticism, race, opera Discriminating Ears Discriminating Ears: Critical Receptions of Blackness in the Music of George Gershwin and William Grant Still Hannah Edgar Year IV – University of Chicago As Georg Friedrich Haas’ “I can’t breathe (In memoriam Eric Garner),” Vijay Iyer’s “Suite for Trayvon (and Thousands More),” Ted Hearne’s Coloring Book, and other recent social justice- oriented compositions demonstrate, contemporary classical music is buzzing with the reverberations of the Black Lives Matter movement. This redoubled sociopolitical engagement has cast a critical mirror on the classical canon in recent years, and, as usual, the reflection is overwhelmingly white. In forging a way forward, a look at the past offers illuminating insights: What has been the rhetoric of exclusion in Western concert music? What were its terms, its euphemisms? And how did we get here, now? This paper will examine racial hegemony in Western art music, specifically how critical receptions of works reinforce otherized conceptions of Blackness. Two prominent twentieth-century composers will be analyzed as case studies, and contrasted: George Gershwin—a white composer whose Porgy and Bess remains in the canon despite its controversial history—and 75 Nota Bene William Grant Still—one of the most prominent twentieth- century African American composers whose opera Troubled Island has been relegated to the fringes of the repertoire. Though Still and Gershwin’s careers took on dramatically different trajectories, foundational elements of their compositional approaches overlap. Both traded in the popular music industry before launching their “serious” concert careers. However, at the time, their associations with that industry—not to mention the very distinction between popular and art music— were inherently racialized. Still, who knew since boyhood that he wanted to compose orchestral music, later said that popular music “was the only commercial field open to [him] and others like [him].” 1 With few other options, he viewed his early experiences playing and arranging show tunes as a stepping stone, but not “an end in itself.”2 Although he had similar ambitions as Still throughout his songwriting career, Gershwin’s vocational prospects were never as tightly constrained. Gershwin passed fluidly between the worlds of Tin Pan Alley and the concert hall, though some of his contemporaries used this fluidity to challenge his status as a “serious” composer: His major orchestral works (e.g. Rhapsody in Blue, An American in Paris, the Concerto in F) were often discussed in terms of an apparent elevation of jazz, or even a debasement of classical music. In 1925, an essay for Vanity Fair 1 Coincidentally, Gershwin sent an effusive autographed copy of Rhapsody in Blue to W.C. Handy, the “Father of the Blues” and Still’s employer during his songwriting days. 2 William Grant Still, “A Composer’s Viewpoint,” in William Grant Still and the Fusion of Cultures in American Music, edited by Robert Bartlett Haas (Los Angeles: Black Sparrow Press, 1972), 126. 76 Discriminating Ears written by critic and Four Saints in Three Acts composer Virgil Thomson read disapprovingly of “highbrow jazz” like Rhapsody in Blue. He argued that jazz, which he called “dance music… [with no] intrinsic musical quality beyond this elementary muscle- jerking,” could be elevated through symphonic treatment, but was still not a suitable subject for such.3 Thomson’s essay is only somewhat nuanced: He asks critical, questions about classically trained composers’ positionality to and appropriation of jazz, while praising the works of Black composer R. Nathaniel Dett (though he misspells his name as “Delt”). However, given that the classical idiom has been conventionally forged by white Europeans and the jazz idiom by Black Americans, the rhetoric of Thomson’s dismissal—especially in equating jazz with a certain base physicality—hinges on racialized value judgments and a problematic ghettoization of both genres. The reception of Porgy and Bess was emblematic of similar rhetoric. After its New York premiere, it was criticized as being more akin to musical theater than opera, despite being explicitly defined as the latter and calling for classically-trained singers. Critic Paul Rosenfeld dismissed Porgy as “an aggrandized musical show,” while Thomson, sharpening his pen again for Modern Music magazine, wrote that "Gershwin does not even know what an opera is.” 4 Again, the implication was clear: Gershwin had failed because Porgy and Bess’ spiritual- and blues-influenced idiom was too popular in tone—a euphemism for artistic inferiority. Most importantly, both Still and Gershwin took after Antonín Dvořák in their belief that spirituals (and later, jazz and 3 Virgil Thomson, “The Cult of Jazz,” Vanity Fair, June 1925, 54. 4 Virgil Thomson, “George Gershwin,” Modern Music Vol. 8, No. 1 (November– December 1935), 17. 77 Nota Bene blues) ought to be an integral part of a uniquely American music. Still’s vision of American music was wholly cosmopolitan: He composed works informed by Latin American, Native American, and European folk themes, as well as Black spirituals. “Just as America was once known as the ‘melting pot,’ so is American folk music as rich and as interesting as the music of all the national and racial groups that come to these shores… Just as most of these people are now Americans, so can their music be classified as American,” he once wrote.5 Gershwin, too, believed that the heterogeneity of American music was its most essential feature. He had long dreamed of producing a full-length opera on American themes set in his home city.6 “I’d like to write an opera of the melting pot, of New York City itself, with its blend of native and immigrant strains… black and white, Eastern and Western,” he wrote to a friend in 1929.7 Gershwin’s goal was to craft a unique musical voice that “should achieve out of this diversity, an artistic unity.” Gershwin eventually abandoned the draft in favor of Porgy and Bess. However, his decision to refocus the ambitious project on a poor Black community in the South at a time when most American composers of “serious” music turned to Anglo-Saxon themes was nothing short of radical. 8 Moreover, Gershwin 5 William Grant Still and Verna Arvey, “Our American Musical Resources,” in The William Grant Still Reader: Essays on American Music, edited by Jon Michael Spencer (Durham: Duke University Press, 1992), 194. 6 David Zax, “Summertime for George Gershwin,” Smithsonian, August 8, 2010. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/summertime-for-george- gershwin-2170485/. 7 Ibid. 8 Ray Allen, “An American Folk Opera? Triangulating Folkness, Blackness, and Americaness in Gershwin and Heyward's ‘Porgy and Bess,’” The Journal of American Folklore 117, no. 465 (2004), 254. 78 Discriminating Ears stipulated that the opera have an all-Black cast at a time when other staged works were freely using blackface singers and when opportunities for classically-trained vocalists of color were few. As baritone Todd Duncan, who originated the role of Porgy, recalled, “The fact that the show had an all-black cast was part of [the backlash to Porgy and Bess]… Remember, that was 54 years ago, a time when Negroes weren’t allowed into this theater or that, into this church or that restaurant.”9 In subtitling Porgy and Bess “an American folk opera” as opposed to a “Negro folk opera,” Gershwin centers historically African American musical traditions in his rendering of American folk music, echoing Dvořák’s sentiments some decades before.10 Gershwin outlined his reasoning for identifying Porgy and Bess as a “folk opera” in a somewhat circular statement to the New York Times: Porgy and Bess is a folk tale. Its people naturally would sing folk music. When I first began work on the music I decided against the use of original folk material because I wanted the music to be all of one piece. Therefore I wrote my own spirituals and folksongs. But they are still folk music – and therefore, being in operatic form, Porgy and Bess becomes a folk opera.11 9 Howard Reich, “A bold venture to restore Gershwin’s music,” Chicago Tribune, October 24, 2017. 10 Allen, “An American Folk Opera?”, 254.
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